I recently read a couple books by the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist.
Coelho has an interesting story. As a child, he longed to be a writer, but his parents disapproved, so he instead ended up in law school. He dropped out after a year and quickly picked up a career as a songwriter. About ten years past, and he had a spiritual awakening while walking a Christian pilgrimage route in Northern Spain. He realized that he was living a satisfactory life, but not living out his true dream of becoming a writer. Within a year, The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist followed.
The Pilgrimage is an autobiography/novel about Coelho’s Northern Spain pilgrimage. He meets a guide that takes him on the treacherous journey as he learns reflective life practices along the way.
The Alchemist is by far his best-selling book, attaining a Guiness World Record mark of most translated book by a living author. It's a fable about a young shepherd who leaves his comfortable life behind to search for treasures hidden in the pyramids of Egypt. Only about 150 pgs, it’s an easy read, and it definitely left me feeling uplifted. I highly, highly recommend The Alchemist.
There are so many ideas I want to touch on from these books, but I’ll focus on just one for now. I wanted to talk about something that relates to the whole basis of The Alchemist, which starts from a young shepherd’s recurring dream. The shepherd can’t shake this deep-down desire that he’s supposed to chase down some distant treasure, and even though it sounds crazy, he finally builds up the courage to depart on the journey.
As for my "journey" of becoming a doctor, I have a similar scene that scrolls through my head every once in a while. I wouldn’t say it’s why I want to be a doctor nor would I call it a recurring dream, but it’s just an image that’s been stuck in my head for a while. I’ll explain:
I imagine myself walking the halls of my Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in the late hours of the night, maybe 1 or 2 AM. The rooms are dark, except for the dimmed hall lights. I run into a dad struggling with the loss of his only daughter. For the fifth time that day, I go over the ever worsening white blood cell counts of his daughter, and we get to talking about his life. We sit down, I pour us a glass of gin, or coffee, whichever is more available. He talks about his life, and I sit there listening. He might not decide to do a complete 180 with his life, but he thinks about it. And maybe the seed is planted for future change.
If you’re wasting the time to read this blog, odds are probably good that we’ve had a chat like this. It’s probably my favorite thing, speculating about life. I've seen hospitals, with emotions running high, as a place that opens the door for such thoughts. I want the opportunity to work somewhere that I can support people confronting these struggles, literally life and death. That would definitely be my dream job.
When I explain why I want to go into medicine, I don’t really talk about this scene because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the image is always in the back of my head. And I can’t help but be struck by the last line from The Pilgrimage:
“I guess it is true that people always arrive at the right moment at the place where someone awaits them.”
Hopefully one day in my future, I’ll be at the clinic at the right time.
from ken
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Earlier today, I was thinking about a question: What do you consider to be your personal achievements? I thought about it for a bit, then bulleted out a few of my accomplishments. - Being elected one of the captains of my college cross country team, despite being the slowest
- Publishing a scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal
- Having the courage to move to across the country to Portland despite not knowing anyone
- Maintaining this blog for as long as I have, and learning to love writing
- Sustaining old friendships east of the Mississippi
As I looked over this list, and reflected a bit on what I’ve done with my life up to this point, I got to thinking. And I remembered the words of the humanity activist Shane Claiborne:
“I’m not too concerned with what I am going to do. I am more interested in who I am becoming.”
As I try to decide where to go with my life, and what sort of accomplishments to shoot for next, I’m really shifting my focus from tangible goals like getting x job or winning y award, to the sort of person I’m becoming. I figure, if I become more and more the sort of person I desire to be, the accomplishments will fall into place.
Sidenote, Amulya and I always used to talk about how we were “intangible” guys. At its core, it was basically our way to explain us not being as good as other people on paper. Other people might have higher IQ’s, harder abs, faster cars, wittier jokes, but the things that can’t counted, we had that. Or at least, it helped me sleep at night.
Anyways, I summed up the sort of person I want to become in three points:
1. I want a, “For the horde,” mentality. I think life was meant to be lived for the good of society. We were meant to both, be taken care of, and take care of. It’s hard for me to remember this, but I want to put myself in a position to give back. past post
2. I want to always place myself in an environment of growth. I want to have the courage to leave old environments and enter into brand new scary ones. I know it’s easy to get stale, and then be scared to leave that comfort, but I also know I will just get frustrated with myself in that stale zone. “Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” – Abigail Adams
3. I want to be grateful. I want to always remember the opportunities I’ve had, and have now. past post“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
from ken
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A couple years ago my friend Amulya attended a summer seminar by a surgeon, Alfredo Quinones. It turned out that Alfredo is one of the most inspiring people alive. I’ll just steal Amulya’s description: Speaking of absolutely brilliant people, I recently met one of the most inspirational, incredible, amazing, bright people I think I will ever meet in my life. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. Seriously, all I want is for you to meet him. Everything he talks about resonates with everything I've heard from you about wanting to be a doctor. Basically read this article to learn about him.
He's a doctor at Johns Hopkins who does brain surgery. His story is absolutely ridiculous, but more importantly he's just a great guy. He teaches part of a class going on here and he was just so friendly and really made me feel welcome. It's a graduate level class, I'm not even enrolled, and he's standing next to me explaining stuff about the brain and the nervous system and brain tumors and he's basically a world-renowned surgeon. He gave this talk later that night that I went to, and it was basically just an inspirational talk about giving everything your best, and I've heard that talk a million times, but he's living proof of it.
He was an illegal immigrant worker who went to Harvard Medical School and now is one of the most famous surgeons in the world. He single-handedly made me reconsider going into medicine just so I could help people like he does. As soon as I met him I was like, "Ken would love this guy."
Alfredo pursues what is described as, “A punishing clinical and research workload,” and he does this out of a deep sense of gratitude. One patient that Alfredo treated remains etched in his memory. A teenage patient who was just accepted at UC-Berkeley, the first one in his family to go to college, the beaming pride of his entire family. The patient had a brain tumor that slowly wasted his body away and killed him within a year.
Alfredo knows the life he used to live on the farmlands, and he knows the life he lives now at Johns Hopkins. He knows he could have just as easily ended up on that ICU bed with an untreatable brain tumor. He has been given such an opportunity, and though he may never be able to return the favor to the incredible people he met along the way, he might be able to pay it forward and give back to humanity. It strikes me, in this six page profile, that all he wants from life is to give back.
Amulya was right, I do love this guy. I especially love his drive, but not necessarily his level of drive. I think I am ambitious now, and I think at times I pursued what I could justify describing as a “punishing” workload. But I did this mostly out of pride.
I want others to see how good I am. I want to be the best. Basically, I want to be better than you. Though sometimes I think, “Well, drive is just drive,” this sort of selfish drive just can’t be sustained. Or at least in my experience, I ran out of it.
It’s pretty much my dream to be driven in the way Alfredo speaks of drive. To have such a perspective of gratitude and to operate from such a humble base. How amazing.
And if you can’t be inspiring and nice to people along the way, what’s the point? I mean, nobody would write an inspiring profile about a jerk, right?
from ken
Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com
